CenturyLink Offers Private Cloud

CenturyLink has announced that it is offering its Private Cloud service in 57 data centers across the world.

"CenturyLink (News - Alert) continues to realize our vision for business-friendly hybrid IT solutions, with public cloud, private cloud and network connectivity all available from one provider," said Andrew Higginbotham, senior vice president, cloud and technology, at CenturyLink. "CenturyLink Private Cloud delivers the best of private cloud – from dedicated hardware and physical isolation to enterprise-level security and service-level agreements – along with our truly innovative public cloud experience, featuring advanced self-service automation and a fast pace of feature innovation."

CenturyLink’s Private Cloud attempts to give customers the advantages of cloud computing, such as the central management and scalability, but with the privacy and security that some enterprise operations such as healthcare and finance require.

Customers can connect both public and private clouds in a hybrid environment, with the less sensitive operations in a public cloud and the operations requiring more security in a private cloud. Businesses can migrate more of their on-premises applications to private clouds.

With a mix of public and private clouds, businesses can shift their IT spending from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, eliminating a lot of overhead. Customers can choose from 57 data centers in 34 cities around the world for the best performance.

CenturyLink’s public and private environments are nearly identical, which will make it easy for customers familiar with the public cloud environment to move operations to private clouds. The cloud servers are physically isolated from CenturyLink’s public, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.

"Hybrid cloud is the enterprise IT operational model of the future," said Melanie Posey, research vice president of hosting and managed network services, at IDC (News - Alert). "CenturyLink Private Cloud provides a frictionless hybrid cloud option for organizations that want to source private and public cloud services from a single provider and connect cloud with other IT services through an extensive Tier 1 IP network."